Light Up The Sky

This is about how I got the biggest laugh in the play, "Light Up the Sky," by Moss Hart, without even trying. I had been in Vermont with a college theater group, and drifted down to Boston for the summer. A friend there suggested that I go on to Provincetown on Cape Cod and check out the summer theater situation. So, the two suggestions that I got were the Chrysler place and the Provincetown Playhouse. It turned out that the Playhouse had been started by Eugene O'Neill and some others from New York City c. 1911 due to their not being able to get stage space in NYC, and also probably because P-town was sort of an art colony and much more scenic than NYC.

I was very pleasantly surprised when I got to the Provincetown Playhouse. It seems that it had been bought by a couple who were friends of friends; they had gotten married in P-town and they decided to take up summer theater as a reason to return to P-town for romantic summers. The couple had scheduled six plays for the summer and also had taken on six theater interns for classes in stage construction, lighting, sound, acting, and make-up. There were many parties as we had parties for when the new cast of actors got to town, opening night, and strike night, all of which followed a two-week cycle.

So, Light Up the Sky was a nice little comedy in three acts. One of the lead characters, a producer of the play about a play and a playwright, was played by an actor who had been on more than three seasons of the TV show, Dark Shadows. He kind of coached me into how to play my part, which was a two-line walk on in the third act. See, during the first two acts and before the play, I was to be doorman and ticket-taker out on the deck of the little theater. I'd take tickets and open the door for people, and they got used to my face. OK, so for the third act, I got dressed in a trenchcoat, a fedora, and real pigskin gumshoes. By this point, the plot had evolved such that the non-verbal playwright had disappeared and the producer had hired a detective (me) to find and fetch him in time for opening night of the play. At a certain line, my cue, I entered by a door center stage with the errant playwright in tow, and said, "Well, here he is. Is that all you want?" But you would not have believed the roar of the crowd! The whole set-up was that the audience had become used to my face as the doorman/usher, and the fact of my towing an actor on stage sort of blurred the border at the edge of the stage, where the play stopped and life started.

Further Eugene O'Neill weirdness came when I later found myself in Danville, California. There was a Tao House that had been an O'Neill place, too! I have been walking in O'Neill's footsteps, and not knowing it. In stagecraft, a hundred years is no more than the blink of an eye.